fandomhigh | The Day After Doomsday, Wednesday, Period 4

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doomsday

The Day After Doomsday, Wednesday, Period 4

"Aaaalright." So, Reno had missed a few classes, and now the term was over. He licked his lips as he looked over the students gathered in the Danger Shop. "So I was a bit AWOL back there. I trust my Rookie and Rikku had you in pretty good hands the past couple weeks. If they didn't... Hey, means you get a trial by fire now, don't you."

The entire room shimmered, taking the students back to a scenario similar to the one that Reno had set up for their introductions class several weeks back. They were surrounded by a vast expanse of desert with no readily available water in sight. The sky was a sickly shade of spinach green, and in their immediate area, they were standing in what had presumably once been a thriving city, considering how huge it was. It was a pity that it was all sitting in ruins now, a sort of double-decker heap of twisted metal and shattered glass with very little that was still recognizable as a livable building or functional vehicle.

"Welcome to my home," Reno said, his tone almost eerily devoid of inflection, today. "Midgar, at ground zero. Millions dead, literally nothing will grow in the dirt in and around the city. No food, very little shelter, no water, the place is crawling with monsters, the entire city is radioactive, our best fuel source has been rendered impossible to use, and the world government was located at the middle of that city full of wreckage. Presumably, the guy in charge is dead. Try not to die. Anything else you do today is up to you, but you're going to want to do it as a group, aren't you?"

And then he turned around and walked away, taking a seat among the ruins to watch.

Yeah, that was it.

[Open!]

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He won't be any help at all.

He's already done this.

If you're lucky, maybe his girlfriend will show up today to give you all a few pointers. Maybe she won't. Isn't the end of the world so fun and full of the unknown?

He will be around after class if you have any questions about what you should have done, or what the few survivors of Midgar managed to do, at least.

"Coffee, Boss?" Barry said with a wicked grin.

To be honest... there was nothing wrong with today's coffee. Just normal coffee. No additives, no special beans.

Normal.

"I made it extra special for our last class."

Reno might be a little wary by now.

Maybe a little. He was still a bit sedate as he gave the coffee a side-eye.

"Yeah? You piss in it or something this morning?"

Seemed worth asking.

"What? Me? No," Barry said emphatically. "What would make you think that?"

Probably the other weeks that Barry brought him coffee. Hmm. Seems logical there.

"Acorn coffee," Reno replied, ticking it off on his fingers. "Civet crap coffee. Hummingbird-fucking-caffeinated coffee. Seems like Rookie-piss coffee is the next logical step, yo."

See how much credit he gave Barry here? See it?

"Hey, I do have limits," Barry protested. "Human biological functions are a no-go."

Civets were an entirely different things.

Why drink people piss when you could drink weasel crap?

"Well, I appreciate that," Reno said, dryly, before holding out his hand for the coffee. Hey, if it hadn't killed him yet...

"It's been a privilege," Barry said handing over the coffee with a smirk. "Are you doing this again next session?"

"Probably not," Reno replied, shrugging as he looked down suspiciously at the coffee. "I'm thinkin' maybe a class on improvised weaponry next term. Sort of taught one of those before, but it was interrupted by goblins and a bog."

Long story.

"Maybe somethin' else like it in the fall, though. Who knows? I don't plan that far ahead."

"So how'd it actually go down?" Four asked. "Or did you just move here instead?"

"You're lookin' at it," Reno said, nodding out at the wreckage. "Maybe a couple thousand survived in a city of millions. Out of that, people were droppin' like flies because of radiation poisoning and... another, more hostile poison that got right into their blood, attacked 'em from the inside, yo. Took two years to make that shit stop. That was around the time we started almost bein' able to feed everyone again, too. Built a new city on the outskirts of the ruins, usin' the ruins. We call it Edge."

He drummed his fingers against his knee.

"It's been a long time since then, yo," he added. "We've got a few scattered plants growin' here and there, now. A regular courier system bringing food and med supplies into the city across the desert. A few people are even pickin' up the orphans off the streets, cleaning 'em up, givin' 'em homes. It's almost startin' to look like something again, if you look in the right direction and squint. I go back and forth, now, between Rikku's world and there, but they don't need me around. Most of 'em don't want me around, yo.."

Four nodded. "Sounds familiar. I'm a few generations past the initial war. We live in remnants of a city full of stuff we don't have use for any more, eating rationed foods and living regimented lives because we don't want what happened to ever repeat." He ran his hand through his short-cropped hair. "Most people here don't get that."

"Most people here don't want to believe it's something that can actually happen," Reno replied, nodding. "You know how many times I hear some variation on 'this class exercise ain't fair' every week? I dunno. Missed the memo where millions of people dying in the span of an hour was supposed to be fair."

He was bitter about that. A little. For reasons.

"Some of the technology we scavenged from Midgar makes better use in Rikku's world. We don't use it in Edge any more, either. Had to find an alternate power source and most of what we had will only run on what we were using. But people are terrified that something like this'll happen again."

Four nodded vigorously. "I'm the first person out of the city in five generations. My reports have to be incredibly detailed and half of the Dauntless Council thinks my brain has snapped due to stress because people can't just be eating all the time, you know?" He shrugged. "This place is too easy."

"Way too friggin' easy," Reno agreed. "I brought some soil back to Edge a few years back, started growin' beans out of a window box in my room back there. People here don't appreciate hunger like that. Like, I was pretty well off, after a while spent here and considering how much I lucked out after Meteor, so most of what I did manage to grow, I snuck to kids who weren't eatin' a hell of a lot else."

He gave a hollow chuckle.

"And there are people back there who would've killed 'em if they found out perfectly good food was goin' out to the street kids, yo."

Four's smile twisted wryly. "We're hearing that at home right now. People think it's being wasted on the Factionless and they're blaming Abnegation because no one can be as selfless as they seem to be." He paused, then added. "Abnegation run the government because they don't want power. The theory is that if they don't want it, they won't abuse it. People who do want it can't imagine other people don't too."

"We've got somethin' like that goin' on back home these days, ourselves," Reno offered. "After Shinra bit it, people started lookin' toward one of his old employees to pick up the pieces again. Guy was in charge of city planning, once, though he couldn't do a hell of a lot of city anything around the President's say so. He defected, started workin' against the company in secret, and next thing you know, the city falls, the world as we know it ends, and the people are hailing him as a hero and getting him to take over the rebuilding efforts. Think he believes he belongs there?"

Reeve was surprisingly humble for a crazy man with an unnatural affinity for stuffed cats.

"He's doin' a decent job of it, though. Finally made a rule that kids aren't allowed to join the little army he's been building up to protect the city from monsters and worse. And there are always worse. Shame about the kids, though. For some of 'em, it was their only hope of makin' a living for themselves, even now that things are looking up."

"What do they consider a kid?" Four asked. "We're considered adults at 16."

"Who, Reeve?" Reno made a snorting sound at that. "He had that nice storybook upbringing with a mama who loved him and no worries at all. I think he considers people kids until they're damn near twenty. The rest of us, the sane ones, set the bar a little lower, yo. We got kids who've seen more shit than kids should ever see. Ones that had to make the grownup choices even before the Meteor came down. Shit, I started early. Some people were raised into that kind of life."

Four nodded. "Dauntless babies are born with knives in their hands and no sense of self-preservation anywhere."

"Sounds to me like the under the plate kids from Midgar," Reno mused. "All the tenacity in the world, plenty of drive to keep fighting. Not a lick of common sense or a scrap of reason to actually keep going between 'em, yo."

Four's lips quirked up. "That's Dauntless," he agreed. "The Unafraid."

"And that's what you are," Reno replied, looking thoughtfully at Four. "Dauntless?"

Four nodded once. "Yes."

Reno gave another nod at that, filing it away like so much else.

"You end up getting anything out of this class at all, Four?"

The Day After Doomsday, Wednesday, Period 4

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